Movers & Shakers

Justin.tv: One camera broadcast to a website with 35 million users

Our last ZURBsoapbox with Justin Kan of Justin.tv was rocking! Justin shared his story of how he came up with the idea of a 24/7 live broadcast, how he became an international celebrity, and the sharp turn Justin.tv had to make to shape the company into the successfully operating business it is today.

You can listen to the entire podcast below or download it on iTunes. Below is a quick summary and highlights from the event.

Listen to Justin's Podcast

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Google Calendar & the birth of Justin.tv

Back in 2005 Justin Kan and Emmet Shear built Kiko, the first AJAX web calendar. It was hot. Early customers really liked Kiko but right before their launch Google came out with their own calendar which was already integrated with Gmail. Kiko was a YCombinator funded company so Justin and Emmet went to Paul Graham of YCombinator and pitched their next idea: A way to turn your blog into a magazine.

“Ummm. Do you have another idea? ” Paul said.

“Well I thought of a site where I can broadcast myself 24/7 and we can make a reality tv show out of it.”

“Tell me more…” Paul responded.

In 2006 Justin got his seed capital from YCombinator and moved out to San Francisco with Emmet and Mike to start Justin.tv

In the beginning...

A friend at MIT helped out with creating prototype of a laptop in a bag with a camera attached to Justin’s cap. Technology was still a bit unstable but the group consensus was that they’d go ahead with the launch of the site on March 19th, 2007. Now Justin had to do what he promised all along:

“Strap a camera to myself to run around and be interesting for the rest of my life”.

Justin started broadcasting right away. Local news picked it up a week after the launch and the week after that the San Francisco Chronicle contacted Justin to do a story. News sources from around the world followed in following months.

Change of plans

After a little while Justin realized that “I’m not that interesting all the time." People weren't sticking around to watch Justin and, instead, were asking for an ability to broadcast themselves instead.

So the team went back to the drawing board to add this feature to the site. Six months later, in October 2007, Justin Kan turned off his video stream and the “anyone can broadcast” feature went live on the site. Since then they've focused on making it simple and easy for anyone to use live video and broadcast themselves.

We asked Justin a lot of questions during the event, here are some highlights:

What makes it tough to build your product?

"We make decisions based on data now. We log every action on the site and we parse all the data. We know everything that goes on our site. This type of tracking took a long time to build and take a lot of time to monitor and report on. Before we used to make decisions based on team consensus. One good decision we made this was chat. Other features such as groups we probably did not need to spend time and money on. Data driven decisions is an investment but it certainly pays off."

What’s the biggest obstacle in reaching your goals?

"Convince an average person that Justin.tv is an easy to use tool for broadcasting your video. Building an easy channel sharing mechanism – it’s not fun to broadcast yourself when you have no viewers. We’re trying to make it easier to share."

What sets Justin.tv apart from ustream and Livestream?

"We focus on community and lowering the barriers for broadcasting. Livestream and Ustream focus on quality broadcasting for professionals. It’s great but it won’t change the world."

We truly enjoyed Justin's talk—we hope you did too! Be sure to check out the rest of the photos from Justin's ZURBsoapbox on Flickr. See you this friday for the next ZURBsoapbox with Alex Faaborg of Mozilla!

Don't Miss Out on Our Next Soapbox

Soapbox transcript

Justin: Someone should just broadcast 24/7 what they're doing and just
see what happens. Robert Morris who was there was like, "I'll fund that
just to see you make a fool of yourself."

Then we kind of realized, wait, we're not that interesting.
People aren't sticking around. Nobody wants to watch
Justin.tv.

Moderator : Thanks for coming out everyone. We've just Justin from Justin.tv.
I'll give you a quick bio of Justin, and then we'll just
get started. We have about 20 minutes of talking, be
interactive. And then you guys can do Q&A, any questions
that you have from the talk.

So, Justin came out of Yale and went out to a company
called Kiko software, where they were doing an Ajax
calendar that was going to compete with Google Calendar.
Actually if you were here for UserVoice, we mentioned this
company. They ended up selling that on eBay and turning
quite a profit from it. After that, Justin.tv. It was sort
of an idea I guess when you were just hanging out with a
couple guys, drinking beers.

Moderator : . . . covered it, and it picked up tremendous steam. So, I invited
him here to kind of find out what he was drinking that
night.

And how it all got started, how you gained traction with
it, how the product has evolved, how your role in the
company has evolved. So, why don't you just start and tell
us how it began, and how it took off, and how it started
evolving, and how you came to the place you're in today?

Justin: Sure. So, thanks for having me. My name is Justin. I am one of
the cofounders of a site called Justin.tv, which currently
lets anyone broadcast and watch live video online for free.
The company actually started, as you mentioned, as
something completely different. When we had originally
started thinking about Justin.tv, Emmett and I, my
cofounder on Kiko, which is a web calendar, had been
thinking, "How do we get out of this business?"

So, we built this calendar and launched it in February
2006. It was the first ajaxy calendar online. You could
drag and drop. It looked like Outlook, kind of the Web 2.0
colors. We thought it was really great, and actually Rich
from User Voice also worked with us on the design side. We
were thinking about the things we could do with this cool
calendar. You could integrate with Gmail and everything.

And then a month later after we launched, Google came out
with a calendar that looked like Outlook with Web 2.0
colors. So we're thinking, "Okay. This is probably not good
for us." A lot of the early adopters who had used Kiko were
like, "Okay. This is exactly what we wanted. A calendar
that works like Gmail and is here in my email." So we
worked on it. We thought about, "what can we do with this
calendar?" for like six months, didn't really come up with
anything. We realized that we didn't really use calendars,
so we probably weren't the best people to be working on
one.

We were thinking, "What do we do now?" So, I had this idea
of selling the company on eBay, all the assets really. We
sold the website and the user base and the URL and the
code. So, we put it on eBay. Rich has already told you
about that. It ended up going for like $258,000. That was
great. So we were like, "Now what do we do? No we can
actually start the business we really want to do." Kiko had
been a Y Combinator funded company. Y Combinator is a group
of seed investors that invest in younger people with less
experience but they think have the potential to do
something really interesting, largely in websites and
technology, because that's what they know.

So, we were like, "Okay. We need some more funding." We
went to Paul and were like, "Hey. We want to do another
business." The business we went to pitch actually was in
Cambridge. We went to his house. He was there with Robert
Morris, who is a professor at MIT and also at Y Combinator.
We were like, "Okay. We have this business idea. We want to
allow people to turn their online blog or website into a
physical magazine. We talked about that, and he was like,
"I don't really like that idea. Nobody really wants to do
that." He had written a bunch of stuff online. He has his
own site, and he wasn't really interested.

So he was like, "What else do you have? What other ideas do
you have?" I was like, "Well, I have this idea that we're
calling Justin TV that I thought of a couple weeks ago, and
I've been talking about it nonstop to everyone." I was
like, "Someone should just broadcast 24/7 what they're
doing and just see what happens. It was like, "Okay. Yeah,
tell me more about that." I think I actually had mentioned
it to him before. I went into like, "Well, you could have
this guy broadcasting. We think you could build something
on the cell phone data networks and send live stream from
places. We don't really know how you'd do it. It seems like
it would be interesting." We started getting excited about
it, and he was like, "Okay." Robert Morris who was there
was like, "I'll fund that just to see you make a fool of
yourself."

So we were like, "Okay. We're doing it. Justin.tv, that's
our next business." So we took the investment for the
company, decided we wanted to move out to San Francisco. We
took a road trip. I emailed all my friends. "We're going to
go move to... Emmett and I are moving to San Francisco, so
we'll never see you again. Goodbye, everyone on the East
Coast." One of them, my friend Mike, said, "I've never been
to San Francisco, so I'll just drive out with you." So we
had to throw a third of our stuff, because it had to fit in
the car, this Honda Civic. He took one seat and his own
stuff, so we end up throwing out another third of our net
belongings, and he came out with us.

We took four days to drive across the country. We got here.
It was awesome. When we drove into San Francisco, it was
Fleet Week and Blue Angels were flying over. I was like,
"Mike, you should really think about joining this Justin.tv
thing. It could be really big. Quit your job and
everything, and start a startup." There was no business
plan. The idea was just, let's make our own reality TV show
on the web. So, he ended up doing that. He's now the
company CEO. We got set up in San Francisco, started
thinking about how you would actually create something that
would let you broadcast 24/7 on the Internet.

Before we had left Boston actually, where Kiko was based,
we had recruited another friend from MIT, Kyle, who's the
fourth cofounder. He was an electrical engineering major.
"How would you create a live broadcasting mobile camera?"
We asked him that, and then we left. A couple weeks later,
he sent this 17 page PDF on how exactly to create a live
broadcasting mobile camera. It was like, "You need all
these things. If you manufacture 1,000, it would cost this.
One unit would cost this." Everything down to CAD drawings
of the molding for the plastic. We were like, "Oh. That's a
good idea. Let's do that."

So, he came out actually a couple months later with a
prototype of this camera. It was basically a computer with
an EVDO card and a video encoder that he could fit into
this backpack. So, the first prototype was literally a
backpack with a computer inside and a camera hooked up to
that that streamed data over a cell phone data card. At
that point, it took about six months to get a prototype
going on. All the while, I remember all the guys from Y
Combinator were like, "You guys should just launch it. What
are you waiting for?"

It was totally unstable. We would try to broadcast, and it
would like for three minutes, and then something would
break. Technology was really, really horrible. It was an
analog video camera going into a card that encoded in MPEG4
that steamed that to this Linux computer basically, which
multiplexed it over multiple modems basically, and then
sent it back to our sever, which would ingest the different
streams, recombine them into video. And then we needed a
translator from MPEG4 to something that Flash could read.
So the only way we figure out how to do that was to have a
Windows box screen capping this MPEG4 stream and then re-
encoding it into 3P6, and then that would send it through
Flash Media Server to our site. A visitor showed up on the
site, but at that time FMS, Flash Media Server 2 was
horrible for streaming live video, and that would break
just as much as everything else.

So, we finally got it kind of stable. We did a demo, and
then we were finally like, "Let's do this. Let's launch
this site." The I realized at that point, I would actually
have to do what I had been saying for six months that I
would do, which is strap a camera to myself and run around
trying to be interesting for the rest of my life.

So I was like, "Oh, well shit. Okay. We're going to do it."
So, we still at this point had no idea how we were going to
make any money or what would happen. But we were like,
"Okay, let's launch." We got a hold of a TechCrunch writer,
Nick Gonzales, and said, "Will you write a story about
this." He was like, "Okay." So, he wrote a write-up of
Justin.tv of what we were going to do, a plan. We were
like, "We're going to launch it Monday morning at 10:00am.
We have a whole thing of activities to do, and it's going
to be great." Then the story went out at like midnight on
Monday. They refused to take it out and post it at 10:00,
because it had already been out. It was too late.

People started coming to the site, and we were all sitting
around trying to make everything work. At various points,
everything started breaking. So Kyle and Emmett, two of my
cofounders who are the technical ones behind the whole
thing, basically spent the next eight hours, they just
stayed up that entire night, and subsequently for the next
probably seven days. They were sleeping like three hours a
day making everything stay up. We just started the show
then. That Monday, I ran around trying to be interesting. A
lot of people came and poked their heads in and were
talking in the chat room like, "What's going on with this?"
It was pretty fun to do actually, for a while.

So, let's see. What happened? The first week, there was
some blog coverage on TechCrunch and stuff like that. The
second week, there was some local news. The NBC affiliate
picked up the story, and the CBS affiliate. So they
followed us around with a camera for a little bit. The
third week, there was a front page article in the
Chronicle, because we had known one of the Chronicle
reports, the technology reporter for the Chronicle. After
that, there was MTV, the Today Show, and all this stuff.
There was buzz around it, because it just snowballed, and
it was a human interest story.

So all these people started coming to the site, and we were
like, "All right." It was just going around doing media
interviews and in between trying to figure out interesting
parties to go to for about a month and a half.

Then we kind of realized, wait, we're not that interesting.
People aren't sticking around. Nobody wants to watch
Justin.tv. So we were like, "Okay. Now what are we going to
do?" So, what we thought of, I guess, was we should make
this . . . the number one thing that people had asked us
was, "Hey, how do I do my own stream? How do I make my own
stream? How do I do my own broadcast?" We were like, "Okay.
I guess we should make this a platform for anyone to do
their own broadcast, and hopefully some of them will be
more interesting than I am."

So, we basically went back to the drawing board and spent
the next four months working on making a platform for
anyone to broadcast live. Then, at the same time, it was
trying to keep what little traffic we had alive by running
around with this camera. Then we, in October of 2007,
turned it into a site for anyone to broadcast, a platform.
We also turned off our own stream so that we could focus on
actually running the platform. That was the big pivot we
did, and that's how Justin.tv started.

Audience Member: How many people were watching what you were watching?

Justin: How many people? It was in the 200, 300,000 uniques a month
between March and October of '07.

Audience Member: So, if you're on the Today Show, somebody would turn on
Justin.tv and watch you being on the Today Show. It's a
circular thing there.

Justin: It was, but it wasn't that interesting, because when you're a
remote guest filmed in a studio, the only thing I was
looking at was . . . the studio was entirely black, except
there's this backdrop of San Francisco behind me. So what I
was looking at was actually a big bright light.

Audience Member: So, if I went to your website, I'd just see this big glow.

Justin: Yeah. At that time, you would've just seen the studio lights
and a camera that was washed out. The whole meta angle
wasn't particular fascinating. I think the cool thing was
to see what these startup guys are doing behind the scenes
to try to generate some traffic and buzz around their
project. So along the way, we raised our venture ground
from some great angels aside from Y Combinator. A lot of
cool guys. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail. And then we
launched this new site and have spent the last three years
working on that. So, it's been pretty interesting. It's
almost the fourth anniversary of Justin.tv.

Audience Member: How small a camera can you get? Because I want to put one
on my dog and see what he's doing right now.

Justin: There's tons of ways to ingest video onto Justin.tv. Basically
we take anything that's virtualized as a webcam on your
computer. So, there are solutions that are wireless. People
put a wireless camera on their animal actually, and then
that goes through their computer, and they broadcast from
their computer to Justin.tv. You can ingest capture cards,
so people play video games and they'll broadcast their
stream onto the site. We have these guys in Africa that do
the safari, and they broadcast with a really high quality
camera over satellite. So, there's probably thousands of
ways to actually get your video in, and we support a lot of
different broadcasters. Some of them we make ourselves,
like the default one on the site, but also more advanced
things if you want advanced editing and cutting and stuff
like that.

Audience Member: Do you have any regrets in that first six months of trying
to launch your startup in the way you did?

Justin: First of all, we would never have gotten to the point that we
are now. We weren't thinking, "Let's make a live video
platform." We were thinking, "Let's do this crazy idea and
see what happens." So, we saw what happened, and then we
promptly decided on something and pursued that. It's easy
to say, "If we had done these six things or three things,
we would be so much further ahead today." I say that a lot,
but a lot of people have also said to me, "You never know
that it would have worked out like this if you had done
those things, made those mistakes."

Audience Member: If you had an option to do something differently . . .

Justin: Having a platform ready to go would have been awesome. Get all
this buzz and instantly convert it to millions of people
working on this flawless platform that the video server was
completely stable and always stayed up. That would be
amazing. Unfortunately, it's taken us like three years to
get to that point where we have technology that we think is
rock solid. We have a video system that supports over 100
GB of concurrent usage. So that's like hundreds of
thousands . . . actually, upwards of a million concurrent
streams. We can support thousands of people broadcasting to
one person all the way to people broadcasting to streams of
hundreds of thousands of people.

Audience Member: How about personally in that six months? Obviously, you
put yourself out there quite a bit. Is there any part of
that that isn't so fun anymore?

Justin: There were certainly times that it was like . . . the thing
weighed 30 pounds after batteries. So it was like, "Well,
this really sucks. It's like I'm carrying around a 30 pound
ball and chain." But I think it was good. Personally, it
was a very fun thing to do for the large majority of it,
because I got to go around and be a pseudo-celebrity, and
that was awesome. I think it was pretty good on a personal
growth level. I was always introverted before, and being
able to go out and meet people and tell people about what I
was doing was a very enriching experience.

Moderator : So you have this idea of people broadcasting and everybody was up
there, and they've got their channel. How do you make money
off it, or how does it generate income?

Justin: Justin.tv has ads on it, like there's probably an ad on the
ZURB page.

Moderator : It's like Bank of America.

Justin: Well, you should sign up. So, just like a lot of media
websites, we have advertising on the site.

Audience Member: Are you thinking of going premium [inaudible @19:38]?

Justin: We have a pro account that you can buy. It gives you some chat
colors, obviously so you can chat, and you can make your
user name black in the chat. But in terms of selling
something premium to broadcasters, our goal is really to
lower the barriers to broadcasting. With a premium
broadcaster account that gives you more broadcasting
features, most people are never going to get there. If you
sold that on YouTube, most people would never get there.
Our goal is to make it easy for everyone to use live video
and get some benefit out of it. Even if you just wanted to
log online and chat to friends and family, not necessarily
produce your own live television show. The things that we
think about on a day to day basis are, how do we make
things easier? How do we make the user experience easier?
How do we provide more value to the everyday person? How do
we make data driven decisions on the product to reach those
goals?

Audience Member: If you had to look at your own team, what would you say is
the hardest thing about building a product? You said you
have 20+ people on your team now. What would you say makes
it tough to build your product?

Justin: I think the hard part for us was really . . . today, I can say
that we make a lot of decisions based on data. We measure
it when you copy the link out of your URL bar and send that
to somebody. When they click that link, we know that you
shared it. We track every user action on the site. We log 4
TB of logs every month, and we parse those all on our own
Hadoop cluster.

We know every user, everything that goes on the site. That
took a long time and a lot of man-hours to build and didn't
get done until recently.
For the past three years before that, we were really making
decisions based on, "Hey, let's do this. Sounds like a good
idea." Maybe have a big debate about it. That wasn't really
that effective. We did some good things, like we were the
first site to have video and chat for live broadcast. I
think that was a fundamental good decision. A lot of our
subsequent things that we build, like group features or
lots and lots of extra features actually, were probably
things that if we had been measuring usage and really
figuring out what people wanted, we didn't really need to
spend time on it. I think it's true of almost any product
team that they build things that oftentimes are maybe not
the most informed.

Audience Member: [inaudible @22:13] make that switch to trying to be more
data driven in your decision making?

Justin: Actually, a lot of it goes to our VP of Products that we hired,
who has a very data driven mentality. He was like, "It's
really important that we do this." After a couple years of
trying to guess what people wanted, we were like, "Okay.
That makes sense. Maybe we should try it. It couldn't hurt
to try." So, I think that was a big driver of it. I'd love
to take all the credit, but I had pretty much nothing to do
with that part.

Audience Member: What got you thinking about trying to build something
yourself versus using tools on the shelf to help you
[inaudible 22:48]?

Justin: On the data side?

Audience Member: Yeah. It sounds like on the data side, you're parsing it
all yourself.

Justin: We've look at what we think of as every tool out there, and it
was very hard to... there are a lot of specific things that
we want to measure, like cohorts, the virality of cohorts.
There doesn't seem to be any tool to do on the scale that
we want to do. With virality of cohorts, that may be in
multiple AB tests and examining all the funnels for those
people concurrently. I don't know. We've actually been
going back to the drawing board recently and said, "Maybe
there is a tool that can help us do all of this. Then we
wouldn't have to maintain this gigantic tool." But we
weren't able to find anything really. So, we use a lot of
different tools out there for user testing and stuff like
that, but for our statistics, we have that in-house and
have people work on that full-time.

Audience Member: How big is your data center? How many servers? What kind
of network bandwidth do you have to sign up for.

Justin: About a year ago, me and my cofounder Kyle were working on all
the network engineering stuff together. He was really
working on it, and I was helping in whatever capacity I
could, racking servers or something. But we actually hired
a great network team. That's the few specialists that we
have hired, our network engineer, and they'd taken mostly
over. So my data is probably a little incorrect, but we
have over 100 gigs of in-house capacity that's 100 GB per
second. So, we pure off a lot of our traffic. We're in four
locations globally. We have data centers in four locations
and probably three to 400 servers now, about half of which
are video servers. Don't quote me on any of this. If you
want to know the real numbers, tell me later.

Audience Member: What's your top application? How are most people using it?

Justin: We only really have one thing, which is live video and chat.

Audience Member: Right, but for what purpose?

Justin: People do everything on the site. Watch every from watching
foreign content to just chatting, broadcasting themselves
and chatting with random people who come into their room.
One that's pretty popular and that I like to watch actually
personally is people playing video games. These guys play
video games, broadcast the stream of it, and then record
over. You also get them speaking over it. Sometimes they'll
do picture in picture, like an action shot of them sitting
on the couch, and just do a live podcast of that. That's
something I like to watch, because I don't have . . .

Audience Member: Musicians, right? You have musicians?

Justin: Yeah, we have musicians on the site that broadcast. We've had
Chris Brown release a single in the past on the site. We
have a lot of indie musicians that I can't name, because
I'm not cool enough.

Audience Member: And they always put up something whenever I go on there.
Broadcasting a new song. I think somebody's coming over to
your office to play a song or something.

Justin: Maybe. We've had that before, people come in. The marketing
team actually arranges a lot of the musician outreach and
sometimes bring people into the office. Sometimes we'll be
sitting around talking about some features or doing work,
and then all of a sudden, someone's playing guitar in the
back.

Audience Member: I'm curious, you mentioned your cofounder quite a bit.
Obviously, the name of the site is based on you. Did that
present any conflict when you first started . . . "Who are
you to say what's going on?"

Justin: No one else wanted to wear that camera around. So it was kind
of like, I had this idea, and it was like, all right, I'm
going to have to do it. Everybody else was like, "All
right. You're going to do it."

Audience Member: You were aware of the sound of the name, Justin.tv, right?
Was that not just a coincidence?

Justin: It was a coincidence in that, if my name was Dave, we probably
would have named it Dave.tv. At the time, we weren't
thinking, "We're going to turn this into a big platform."
If I had any choice though, I would have chosen a .com
name, because nobody knows that .tv is a TLD in the
mainstream world. So, nobody really was fighting for that
right.

Audience Member: I guess I'm more curious after about six months when
everyone was like, "Oh, he's going around. He's on all
these shows." Did that influence the dynamic of how you
were six months before and then you were like, "We're not
going to do this anymore. Let's switch our platform."

Justin: I think it was universally agreed upon that keeping the same
domain was good, because we had some traffic to it. People
knew about it, and it associated with live video. So, we
just went with that assumption. It wasn't very scientific.
It wasn't a huge debate.

Audience Member: Less on the name and more about the dynamics on your team.
You were getting all this attention, and everyone was
looking at you, and then you had two cofounders.

Justin: I had three cofounders, and I think that they were quite all
right with the way everything worked out. We have a pretty
good division between the four of us. That really doesn't
speak to all the other people who have joined the team
since then. They probably are much more critical than I am.
If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, Justin.tv would still go on
and function probably much smoother.

When we started, Mike, who is currently our CEO, was really
responsible for all the fundraising and operational sides
of the business. I was doing the broadcasting, and as we
started doing the platform, I guess project management and
technical hiring. Emmett's our CTO, and he was doing
basically the front-end architecture. Then Kyle was doing
the video system and the backend architecture. So, we had a
nice division of labor and still do actually.

Audience Member: What next?

Justin: For us, 2010 is all about mobile and data driven development.
So we are making sure that the culture of the company is
very much around doing experimentation, doing small
experiments, measuring everything, and then conclusively
determining what the results of an experiment was on the
product side. So an experiment could be anything from a
different work flow to a feature to changing the text of an
email. We want to track everything. Our goal is really to
increase our usage, that everyday use case among people in
the US who we call social broadcasters, people who are just
creating content on a smaller scale. If we make a tool for
that, it'll be a tool that's good for people who want to do
something more powerful or invest more time in it.

I think Twitter is great example for that. They built a
tool that's very easy for anyone to use, but clearly lots
of celebrities and people who are trying to self-promote
themselves or social media experts, there's always billions
of those, are using it despite its simplicity or because of
it. So, our goal is to really make our product work, much
easier to use. I think it's extremely difficult to figure
out how to use live video or why you would ever want to use
it as a normal person. Our goal is to overcome that
barrier, and our methodology is really building the
smartest product team that we can and letting them do the
experimentation in a framework that lets you measure
results. So, we want to do that on the website, and we also
think that mobile is a very interesting space for us, and
we're working on that, too. You could clone Justin.tv from
those words today.

Audience Member: So, in that [inaudible 31:19], what do you think is the
biggest obstacle you have to overcome from a market
standpoint?

Justin: I think the biggest obstacles you have to overcome are, how do
we convince people that it's something for the average
person, somebody's who's not a celebrity who wants to
broadcast. How do we convince them that it's an easy to use
tool, and then how do we build in the sharing mechanisms
for them to have a good experience? If you show up on the
site and you do a broadcast, and no one shows up and
there's no one to chat with, or there's no interaction.
Justin.tv is all about the social interaction. Even when
people spend a lot of time producing content, the best
shows are the ones where people are chatting, where they're
interacting with each other, where they're interacting with
the broadcaster. So, one thing that we've noticed is that a
lot of people start broadcasting, but no one shows up. That
sucks. That's like having a party, and you're the only guy
there. I've done that. It's not fun.

So, one of our things that we want to do is help people
solve that problem, either through sharing or figuring out
how to get people on the site, figuring out better
discovery mechanisms for the site.

Audience Member: How similar are you to Facebook [inaudible 32:46]?

Justin: You mean like the news feed?

Audience Member: No, they have this CNN thing covering Barack Obama live
stream.

Justin: Oh yeah, on CNN. I guess in a sense, that's video and chat, so
it's pretty similar. Not everyone can create their own CNN
live feed with chat.

Audience Member: I'm thinking of you as a platform in terms of just a
platform.

Justin: In order to get a live feed and do that, you have to go make a
business deal with Facebook. To do that on Justin.tv, you
can just click the broadcast button. You don't get all the
promotion and stuff that Facebook provided CNN, but it's
kind of a platform for anyone to be able to do that on
whatever scale that they want.

Audience Member: What sets your company, Justin.tv, apart from another
[inaudible 33:44] like Ustream or something where you do a
live [inaudible 33:46]?

Justin: One of the things that I think is important is our focus is
really on building that community and empowering people who
are, I guess, beginners to broadcast, and really making it
simpler and lowering the barriers. You think it's extremely
difficult to set up a live broadcast or to figure out why
you would want to do it. I think that because we've been
operating this company and allowing people to do it for
three years and have heard that complaint over and over
again. I think our competitors, Ustream, Livestream, a lot
of them are focused on, how do we enable professional
quality broadcasting on the web. That's something that I
think is interesting, but it doesn't change the world.
People can already watch quality live content. They can do
it on the web with CNN already, or there's lots of it on
TV. So, that's kind of the big difference.

Moderator : Cool. We're pretty much done here.

Justin: All right. Anything you guys want to ask. It could be anything.
It doesn't have to be about Justin.tv.

Audience Member: I've got a question. There is a revenue model for you and
your company. Is there any plan to split that somehow with
the broadcasters to create a source of potential revenue
for broadcasters themselves.

Justin: No, not right now.

Audience Member: I know that's not part of the mandate.

Justin: I'll tell you why. One, we're focusing on people who are doing
it, I guess you could say they're new or amateur. Most
people who go to sites online and try them out, unless
they're explicitly looking like, "How do I make money?" are
not thinking about how it makes them money in the context.
Two also, the money that an average person makes from your
advertisements are very small. Only in a massive aggregate
do we make any money at all. So, I think people would be
disappointed with the results, and also it changes the
equation. When you pay someone to do something, it's not as
inherently fun for them. So, we want to not introduce that
into the community. So, a lot of people do, who are
interested specifically in making money, will create a
stream, put it on their own site, tell people to go to that
site on their Justin.tv page, and then have advertisements
or other ways to monetize their community on their site,
which is good. I'm all for that. But I don't think we're
planning on doing that in the future on site.